Piety and Intellect in Puritanism

W T THAT the Puritans knew as common sense about the mind has survived to be enshrined by historians as a theory of psychology. Puritans grew up thinking of the mind in terms of the faculties, such as reason and will. Today we recognize that the Puritans had accepted the faculty psychology, a theory much older than they were. We have long since rejected this theory and have exhausted several others; yet we have not managed to divest ourselves of its vocabulary nor have we shaken off its underlying assumptions. Like the Puritans we still describe the mind's functioning with the familiar terms reasoning and willing. And, like them, we separate thought and feeling and ascribe a duality to the mind. The assumption that the mind is a duality has proved especially important in the interpretation of Puritanism. If the Puritan mind was a duality the problem is one of establishing the relationship of the two parts-the religious emotion, or piety, and the ideas that historians agree informed the mind. Historians have approached this question with the familiar suppositions that emotion somehow produces ideas or, phrased in another way, that religious ideas are the articulations of piety. This proposition seems to defy more explicit statement and it does not exclude a second assumption, which may appear to be in conflict with it, that piety and intellect were historically in opposition to one another. Both assumptions may contribute to a disposition among historians of Puritanism to think of the psychic process in mechanistic terms-in this case as entailing from feeling to thought. Both hold that the mind was duality; and both imply that piety and intellect were separate. With its descriptions of images shuttling back and forth among the faculties, the traditional Puritan psychology had obvious mechanistic overtones. If historians have found much of the old language antiquated, they have insensibly made use of the notion of a mechanical movement in

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Intellect · Piety · Sociology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Philosophy · Religious studies

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